We all have a soft spot for our first cars. My actual first car was a quarter share in a 1962 Volkswagen Squareback, it was tangerine orange and had leopard skin front seats. It was great, but also rubbish. We toured California in it for a month. When we hit a steep hill (the Sierra Nevada mountain’s are full of these) three of us had to get out and walk. The first car I bought by myself was actually pretty cool (a 1968 Dodge pick up), so we wont talk about that here. Polling the CC team revealed a fine selection of rubbish first cars. We sketched a few of the most iconic, but chose to start with what might be two of the very best (worst); the Ford Fiesta and the Austin Metro.
An ex-girlfriend had a Mark I Fiesta, known affectionately as The Skip. It could be opened with pretty much anything you could stick in the lock – I once opened it with a lolly stick. Despite sounding like it should have been scrapped years earlier (hence the name), it ran more or less successfully for years. Another stonewall classic, and the second of rubbish first car line up, is the Austin Metro. My friend James’ mum had a one and she used to do a lot of driving us to sport and other stuff so I’ve spent a lot of hours crammed in the back of that British built biscuit tin on wheels. Some of them are still going, amazingly. My co-judge on Sewing Bee Esme’s brother has one, it has moss growing on the window seals, and usually needs at least one repair per trip north, but it gets them about the Yorkshire countryside in vintage style.
If you like the rubbish first car t shirts, we’ve a couple of others lined up and ready to go, but feel free to post pics of yours and tag us in them. If there are any beauts we’ve forgotten we might throw them into the mix.
Happy (rubbish) motoring!
